Why South Africa's Over the Rainbow

• Share

On a warm summer's day in mid-January, South Africa's ruling party, the African National Congress, held a rally in East London on the country's southern coast to launch its campaign for re-election. Inside the city's stadium, in a pen between the stage and a sea of supporters in the ANC colors of yellow, black and green, stood the party's VIPs. Many of the men wore Gucci and the women Prada, but mixed in with them were 60 or so people, of both sexes, in combat fatigues whose camo caps identified them as veterans of Umkhonto we Sizwe ("Spear of the Nation"), the ANC's disbanded guerrilla wing. A well-dressed young man whose baseball cap announced he was a fan of the Porsche World Roadshow, chatted to another in a scarlet T shirt that declared: "Let's all young people Join the Young Communist League of South Africa to crush capitalism as a brutal system and replace it by communism." The contradictions were on show even in the parking lot, where Range Rovers, BMWs and Mercedes-Benz were pasted with giant ANC stickers promising to "Build a Caring Society."

The ANC is expected to win a fourth consecutive term in South Africa's parliamentary and presidential elections on April 22. But for the first time since it came to power with the end of apartheid in 1994, that result is not guaranteed, and by any measure — popularity, membership, moral authority — the party is in decline. Its leaders are embroiled in a series of scandals involving both corruption and ineptitude. As a government, it has failed to stem raging violent crime and the world's largest HIV/AIDS epidemic. It has presided over an economic boom that has made millionaires of a well-connected élite but left countless lives unchanged. As a party, it is accused of politicizing the police and the bureaucracy and showing contempt for the constitutional democracy for which it fought so long. (See pictures of South Africa in the run-up to the election.)

The party split in November when a group of disaffected members formed a breakaway group, the Congress of the People (COPE), and old friends are turning on it. Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu refuses to vote for the ANC, saying it has betrayed Nelson Mandela's legacy. Helen Suzman, a prominent white antiapartheid campaigner, called its performance an "enormous disappointment" a few months before her death on New Year's Day.

For many, the ANC's new leader, Jacob Zuma, embodies the party's decay. He won the leadership in late 2007 after a vicious fight with predecessor Thabo Mbeki that split the party — and led to COPE's formation. In 2005 his business adviser, Shabir Shaik, was sentenced to 15 years for soliciting bribes for him, and for years Zuma has faced a related prosecution for corruption, racketeering, fraud, money-laundering and tax evasion. Last month, Shaik secured an early release because of hypertension. On April 6, after three years of trying to bring Zuma to court, the National Prosecuting Authority dropped the case. State prosecutors denied yielding to pressure by the incoming Zuma government, while arguing — after years of denial — that their case had been irretrievably compromised by pressure from the old Mbeki administration.

Zuma's supporters insist he is just the man to fight for the interests of those left behind in South Africa's first years of freedom. Still, there are questions over Zuma's commitment to racial reconciliation — famously, in a country still wracked by racial violence, he chose the Zulu war anthem, "Bring Me My Machine Gun" as a theme song — and about his competence and judgment. He refuses to answer questions on policy, deferring instead to the ANC's executive committee. His coyness may be wise: those opinions he has aired have been startling. On trial for rape in 2006, a charge of which he was acquitted, he revealed he thought a shower could prevent HIV infection. Among his supporters, all that only adds to his appeal: Zuma has a populist following in the townships where his earthiness contrasts well with the élitism of Mbeki.

The New Struggle
The decline of the ANC is all the more dramatic considering the moral heights it once occupied. In the years it was fighting apartheid, its mission was clear and its righteousness unassailable. ANC members were freedom fighters repressed by a regime whose racism recalled the worst of European imperialism. Mandela, locked up for 27 years only to emerge with forgiveness for his oppressors, was a secular saint. There was no equivocation here. With the ANC and Mandela on one side and apartheid on the other, South Africa was literally a question of black and white.

During those early years, with Mandela presiding as the founding father of what Tutu dubbed "The Rainbow Nation," diversity, it was said, was no longer a source of division, but one of strength, hope, even beauty. Mandela's embrace of the new vision hid the fact that many in the ANC rank and file were struggling to discard their old monochrome view of the world. The ANC was — and still is — confronting the same dilemma that faces all liberation movements once in power. Simply put: good revolutionaries often make bad democrats. Revolutionaries plot in secret, follow orders and serve the people by leading them. Democrats debate openly and serve the people by listening to them. Revolution is resolute, romantic and self-righteous. Democracy is flexible, often boring and riddled with doubt.

History is full of revolutionaries who failed to make the switch. Most promised people's rule but, once in power, embraced a permanent state of revolution — some, like Robert Mugabe and Hugo Chávez, conjuring up fantastical foreign enemies to fight. (To those ranks, now add the leader of the influential ANC Youth League, Julius Malema, who told the East London rally that the young would "never allow them to donate this country to Britain, to the hands of the colonizers.") To their people, this never-ending war is generally experienced as dictatorship. Too many liberation leaders leave office only when another revolutionary seizes power.

See TIME's Nelson Mandela covers.

See pictures of war and displacement in Congo.